The Washington Capitals are hosting the 2015 Winter Classic. Against somebody. Somewhere.

Owner Ted Leonsis said that somewhere would be Washington, D.C., when he officially announced the game on Saturday, as the did the subject line of the league's email release. The body of the release, though, quoted both Leonsis and commissioner Gary Bettman, and both used the phrase "D.C. area."

This might seem like picking nits; it actually underscores the fact that hosting the game at, say, Nationals Park is no guarantee. If it were a guarantee, it would've been announced on Saturday. Nationals owner Mark Lerner is a minority partner in Leonsis’s Monumental Sports and Entertainment, but the team leases the ballpark from the District, and would not have exclusive control over such a decision.

Collins glad to get ahead on announcing Classic. Said NHL staff will start visiting potential venues in the next month. #Caps

Hopefully, a deal with Nats Park gets done. D.C. proper's other outdoor facility is RFK Stadium, which is a crumbling, concrete bowl that opened in 1961. Awesome as it would be, it's tough to imagine the NHL signing off on that one.

FedEx Field, the home of the Redskins is in the middle of nowhere and, uh, the worst. It's also, according to Chris Russell of ESPN 980, not an option. Russell cited a team source in his report; the station is owned by Redskins owner Daniel Snyder and the team's radio flagship.

Baltimore's stadiums, meanwhile, are in Baltimore. The Caps' fanbase obviously stretches North, but it's tough to imagine anyone being totally satisfied with that. That said, if the league wants scale over "intimacy"—ie, a football stadium over a baseball park—M&T Bank Stadium is the "D.C. area's" best option.

In any case, the team is finally getting an outdoor game, albeit a little later than Leonsis would've liked, especially since there are now several per year. The Caps played the Pittsburgh Penguins at Heinz Field in 2011.

“We’ve only been in one; for us, it was a tremendous experience. The novelty hasn’t worn off because people here haven’t experienced that event,” Brooks Laich told the Washington Post. “If you did one five times a year here, ‘Okay, it’s just another outdoor game’. There’s been now a lot of outdoor games, but our market here, our fans here haven’t experienced that except for the ones that drove to Pittsburgh.”